Free Destroying Angel by Michael Wallace

backed halfway to the pool again. The rotten-duck-egg smell hung in the air. It tasted poisonous in his mouth. But the water had stopped bubbling. Whatever poison boiled from the bowels of the earth had stopped.
    “They won’t open the hatches when I knock.”
    The angel stepped up until it stood nose to nose with Taylor Junior, who trembled in terror. “You’ll need to find another way in. Now drink something—you’re dehydrated. The water itself isn’t poisoned.” A smile played across his lips. “Perhaps flavored of Phillip Cobb’s rotting flesh, but safe to drink.”
    “What other way?” Taylor Junior asked. “How do I get in?” He felt sick to his stomach and knew he should get to higher ground, away from the pool.
    “Think. There has to be something.”
    “You don’t know?”
    But then Taylor Junior’s attention faltered, or perhaps he looked away for an instant, and the angel was gone. He looked around, bewildered. He was alone.

    Taylor Junior found the entrance the next morning.
    He’d slept for two nights with his back next to a rocky ridge east of the second sanctuary, on higher ground where the air smelled better. There were no animals on the dead plain—no living animals, that is—and the nights were eerily quiet. No skunks snuffled through camp. No coyotes yipped over a carcass. Not even toads came out to croak.
    But he felt better protected by the rocky overhang, and so he sat every night with his back to the wall and a fire in front of him. He woke throughout the night to feed branches into the fire.
    Taylor Junior reached for his pile of sticks on the third morning to stoke his fire awake and discovered that he’d burned all his wood. He was down to his last can of beans but didn’t relish the thought of eating them cold, so he cast about for something to burn. He’d gathered every scrap of fallen wood, but the juniper trees growing against the rocky ledge still had a few dead branches he hadn’t collected. He snapped off one branch and discovered a ventilation shaft.
    It was cleverly disguised, really, painted tan like the hillside and hidden behind the juniper trees. And a good hundred yards from the main entrance.
    Taylor Junior had a wrench in his backpack, generally used to get at his caches of food hidden in the desert, kept in sealed drumsto keep out rodents. He used the wrench to loosen the bolts that held the protective shield over the shaft opening, then pried off the metal screen that was meant to keep out animals. He stuck his head into the shaft. A distant throb sounded in his ears.
    Taylor Junior tucked his gun into his pocket, together with the wrench, then slung the canteen with the dead Phillip Cobb–tasting water in it over his shoulder by the strap. He left the backpack behind. The shaft was just wide enough to worm through with his arms outstretched in front of him. His body blocked the sunlight at his rear.
    The abandoned military base his followers cowered in sank deep into the ground, and this shaft had to reach them. It might snake around a bit at first, but it would eventually have to drop straight down. What if he fell? Or what if the shaft narrowed and he got wedged inside? There were other ways this could go wrong—so many ways—but he pushed them from his mind.
    About twenty feet in, a pant leg caught on a rivet where one section of metal piping fastened poorly to another, and he spent several minutes squirming his way back and forth until he got it free. His shoulders ached. His breathing came in shallow gasps, and he felt the terrifying sensation of being squeezed like a rat through the belly of a snake. Every few feet he battled a fresh wave of fear that the shaft was growing narrower.
    And then he reached the drop. There was no warning, no breeze, only a hollow void where his shaft dumped into a larger one that fell straight into the bowels of the complex. He paused above the hole for several seconds, felt around the edge to reassure himself of its